Frankly, it’s a fool’s errand to determine the 10 best films of any given year. There’s too much to see, and too many variables to consider about the ones we have seen. And even once we’ve settled on an opinion of a given movie, there’s no way of knowing how it might evolve in the coming days or weeks or years.

SEE ALSO: The best TV episodes of 2018

But that’s also the fun of choosing 10 favorites. This list is a snapshot of what we were into this year, at the end of this year—what made us laugh or week, gape in awe or fall in love over the past 12 months.

10. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before 

In a year of romcom resurgence, none stole our hearts more completely than To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. It was funny, it was sweet, it had loads of personality, and it leaned into that most gleefully ridiculous of romcom tropes, the fake relationship. But the reason we spent a full month watching this damn movie on repeat were its leads, the bubbly Lana Condor and the hunky Noah Centineo, and the electric chemistry between them. 

Every love letter Lara Jean wrote may as well have been us sighing and swooning over To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. It’s that irresistible.

9. Can You Ever Forgive Me? 

Like its antiheroine, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is brilliant in an unflashy sort of way. Unlike its antiheroine, it’s also a pretty lovely way to spend two hours—at least if you don’t mind having your heart shattered at regular intervals.

Melissa McCarthy turns in a career-best performance as the caustic Lee Israel, and she’s well-matched by Richard E. Grant, all charming smiles as Jack Hock. The setting, too, is devastatingly specific: the bookshops and gay bars of early-’90s New York. Lee’s crime (forging letters by famous writers), is the plot of the movie, but not the point of it. That would be the aching loneliness of these two souls on the margins.

8. Hereditary 

Creepy doesn’t begin to describe Hereditary, which gave us some of the most unsettling scenes we’ve ever seen. (Remember the telephone pole? Or the head covered in ants??) It’s the kind of horror that gets under your skin, festering there and keeping you up at night. 

And then, even once that fear has dissipated, it leaves a lasting ache. Because Hereditary isn’t just about literal demons. It’s about grief, in all its madness and its ugliness—its ability to possess you, poison you, pervert everything and everyone around you. Maybe you believe in the power of Paimon and maybe you don’t. But the power of death can’t be denied.

7. Black Panther 

The best fantasy stories pull us into a fully realized world, making us believe—making us want to believe—that it’s all real. Black Panther‘s Wakanda is so vivid, so vibrant, that seeing it for the first time felt like coming home, and leaving it again felt like a bittersweet goodbye. 

Which is not to say that Black Panther felt divorced from our own reality. Far from it. The film grappled with thorny geopolitical issues that had no easy answers, through conflicted heroes and complicated villains—while also delivering satisfying popcorn action and crowning your new favorite superhero.

6. Roma 

“Transporting” doesn’t begin to describe Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which employs unhurried long takes, thoughtfully composed wide shots, and an immersive soundscape to bring you through the screen and into another time and place entirely—specifically, early-’70s Mexico through the eyes of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a kind and quiet live-in nanny. 

What Roma understands is that the personal and political aren’t just inextricably intertwined, but one and the same; that every single detail or setting tells a story, if only you know how to listen; that the intimate can be epic, and vice versa. And despite being released by Netflix, it’s one of the greatest arguments this year for making the effort to actually go to the movies.

5. If Beale Street Could Talk 

So much of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk plays out in the way people look at each other: with love, with longing, with expectation or anger or pride. All those gazes make the film breathtaking in its intimacy, even as it connects a large cast of characters across years and even countries. 

The plot is explicitly about racial injustice—it concerns a young black man (Stephan James) sent to jail on a false accusation, as his fiancée (Kiki Layne) discovers she is pregnant—and the film does not shy away from the ugliness of their ordeal. But what’s most striking about it is its insistence on joy. Beale Street is a film concerned not just with the hardships of life, but in the big and small blessings that make it worth living anyway.

4. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 

Did the world really need another Spider-Man movie? We didn’t think so, until we saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film embraces Spidey’s comic-book roots (this is seriously one of the most gorgeous animated films in recent memory) while simultaneously putting a fresh and funny spin on the mythology we know so well.

Standouts among this new team of ever-stranger spider-people include Jake Johnson as a weary Peter Parker and John Mulaney as a weirdo Spider-Ham. But the story belongs to Shameik Moore’s winsome Miles Morales, a living embodiment of the idea that anyone can grow into that mask.

3. First Man 

First Man‘s IMAX moon landing sequence alone probably would’ve been enough to secure its on best-of-2018 lists. It’s a stunner of a scene, so huge and so crisp that you might think, for a moment, that you’ve actually been transported to the moon.

But what makes that moment hit so hard is everything leading up to it. First Man takes the time to show us all the blood, sweat, and tears—as well as the not-insignificant amount of luck—that have gone into Apollo 11. The greatest accomplishments in history are made up of thousands or millions of tinier achievements and setbacks. By focusing on the small stuff, First Man makes the big stuff feel enormous.

2. The Favourite 

“As it turns out, I am capable of much unpleasantness.” That line is uttered by Emma Stone’s Abigail, but it may as well be the slogan for every single character in this wickedly delicious film.

There’s pleasure in watching Abigail, Sarah (Rachel Weisz), and other courtiers jockey for influence, but there’s tragedy, too, in Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne—ostensibly the most powerful person in the land, but in reality a woman trapped in a gilded cage. Like the cakes she eats, in defiance of her stomach condition, The Favourite will go down sweet, come up acid, and have you going back for seconds.

1. Eighth Grade 

Eighth Grade is such a dead-on representation of adolescence that watching it feels less like remembering your youth than like reliving your youth, with all the expectation and mortification that that entails. This could be the best non-horror movie we’re too traumatized to ever watch again.

Which isn’t to say Eighth Grade is depressing. To the contrary, it ends on a sweetly optimistic note, with a sense that this little girl is going to be all right. Kayla may be unsure of who she is, what she wants to be, and how she wants to be seen—but Eighth Grade knows exactly what it’s doing, thanks to Elsie Fisher’s flawless lead performance and Bo Burnham’s confident direction.

In 1989, Giles Walker was a young artist traveling around Europe with the state-of-the-art Mutoid Waste Company. He was in Berlin building a machine to ram through the Berlin Wall. Little did he know that nearly 30 years later, he would achieve internet fandom for building stripper robots with heads made from CCTV cameras.

SEE ALSO: The pole-dancing robots of CES 2018: An eyewitness report

I met Walker in his London studio and followed him as he began working on his latest pole-dancing robot  — a bigger, raunchier, and sassier version. He’s been commissioned to make the first robot cam girl and has a bigger budget than usual to work with, so he going to town on it with all the bells and whistles. 

For something that is basically a bunch of mannequin body parts, motors, and a brooding CCTV head, the robot was truly impressive to watch as Walker gradually brought it to life. 

“I was sort of creating robots that were kind of dysfunctional, or that lived on the edges of society.”

It was the small details that mattered most – “gesture,” as he calls it. “It’s the choice of wrists and ankles, how they move and react, that says so much about someone” well, technically, something in this case. 

“That’s the unknown, which is actually the fun bit because it all fires up and then does something weird and you think, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s who that one is,’” Walker says.

But the truth is, Walker worries that few really know and understand why he ventured into the slightly creepy territory of robot strippers. Particularly at a time when we are still trying to find the vocabulary with which to even start a debate about sexbots and the deeply disturbing ways they are used to objectify the female body. 

“The interesting thing about these pole dancers is that even though I built them 10 years ago, they’ve now kind of taken on a new role – they weren’t sexbots, they were something completely different, about something completely different,” Walker says.

The robots, CCTV heads and all, were originally built as an uncomfortable commentary on the pervasiveness of technology. Walker became interested in the concept about a decade ago, when surveillance cameras began popping up all over the UK. “That got me thinking about the idea of voyeurism: who has the power of the gaze – the watcher and the one being watched,” he says. 

Fast forward to today, and that message is all the more powerful — and personal — as it becomes clearer how much of our personal data is exploited online. Nonetheless, Walker worries that the original message and metaphor is lost on those who have only come to know about his robot strippers in the past year, assuming that they are, if nothing else, to be used in the sex industry. Walker isn’t entirely sure how to deal with the unavoidable creepiness that comes with that. One thing’s for sure — it seems that he never expected to be building the kind of sculptures he’s building today.

“I was sort of creating robots that were kind of dysfunctional, or that lived on the edges of society,” Walker says. “They were homeless robots, or they were prostitutes, or they were just drunks. The overall story I liked about all that work was, you know, technology is developing so fast and all this technology is getting thrown away, pretty much before it even makes the shops.”

“Even though I built them 10 years ago, they’ve now kind of taken on a new role – they weren’t sexbots.

Walker says that he’s built over a hundred robot sculptures of different sizes and quality. Very few, however, are explicitly humanoid. “If you look, I hardly ever use human heads because I find human heads are kind of, unless they’re like really perfect, they end up looking like spooky dolls,” he says. “And I don’t want to do spooky dolls.” So if you look at his work closely, you’ll find sculptures with loudspeakers, hammers, cars, CCTV cameras instead of heads. 

And yet — there is something profoundly human in all of them. Not perfectly mimicking the human body, like some of the most expensive sex robots, but mimicking the individual imperfections that distinguish us from one another. 

Perhaps the greatest example of this distinctive approach to humanity through the excessively artificial is Walker’s most complex installation — The Last Supper. It’s almost like a miniature theatre piece featuring about 15 robots loosely organised around Leonardo da Vinci’s famous work. 

“My mum died as I was building it,” he explains. “It was kind of where I put all my grief, I think, and so it turned out to be quite a dark piece. Mainly it was about questioning whether religion is a healthy education for young children. But I wanted this sort of flowing feel of threat and violence underneath it all.” 

It’s works of art like The Last Supper that Walker is eager to be remembered and applauded for – not the robot strippers everyone is asking him to make more of. And in that sense, he is finding himself in a complicated power dynamic with his sculptures. 

Once a dedicated scrap artist taking the forgotten and giving it a second lease of life, Walker is now forced to reckon with the fact he may have become dependent on the incredible success and interpretation of his robot strippers. And that in his attempt to mimic human spontaneity through metal, he’s found himself in a closed loop of unabashed demand for robots that can be sexualised. 

But Walker’s approach to art has always been to reflect what’s wrong with society with a sense of humour. This culminated in his latest robot stripper, which is much, much more overt than its predecessors. It talks dirty, twerks and can even mimic orgasms. But despite the fact it will talk dirty and maybe even twerk for you, it’s the inescapable centrality of its CCTV head gazing right at you, almost seeing through you, that adds a crucial sense of self-awareness — and ultimately makes the larger message about where we’re headed stick.

No, Doctor Who is not going to suddenly start killing everybody off (at least that we know of)

But it does look like the show is going to pull a Game of Thrones of sorts in terms of how long it will be between seasons. 

The 11th season of the legendary sci-fi show ended on Sunday, but we won’t see get to see much of The Doctor next year. 

SEE ALSO: Jodie Whittaker will be returning for another season of ‘Doctor Who’

BBC just announced that Season 12 of Doctor Who won’t be ready until 2020. This means that apart from a New Year’s special that will be broadcast on the very first day of 2019, the coming year will be totally free of Doctor Who. 

The showrunner of Doctor Who, Chris Chibnall, tells the BBC that work on the 12th season has in fact already begun. It was recently confirmed that the 13th Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, will be returning for Season 12. 

Christmas Day is usually synonymous with Doctor Who, but there won’t be one to look forward to this holiday season. Instead, fans will have to wait until January 1 to see the festive special, which has been given the very suitable title “Resolution.”

Brace yourself for a sparse 2019 without The Doctor.  

How to make dysfunctional love last forever is a self-help book I’d personally be very, very interested to read. 

Unfortunately, it’s not a real self-help book, and it can’t help solve that problem.

SEE ALSO: The artist behind the ‘Awards for Good Boys’ Instagram isn’t afraid to piss off her trolls

That’s because it’s really a work of book cover art by Instagram artist @JohanDeckmann, who’s page is dedicated to taking the most relatable thoughts and ideas and printing them into fake book covers, which he shares with his nearly 85,000 followers.

His mock self-help titles are so relatable, it’s actually a crying shame they’re not real books (though they are printed on old books from antique stores).

Johan Deckmann, a Copenhagen-based artist, psychotherapist, and author, came up with the book-cover art format when he read a beautiful old book, much like the fake ones from his Instagram.

“I was reading a beautiful old copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and I realised that this would become my artistic expression — my profession as a psychotherapist combined with the authority of the book,” Dickmann tells Mashable. The result is a lot of fake book covers that aim to be “a portrait of the modern human condition and self-sabotage.”

Deckmann tells Mashable that these mock self help-books are just manifestations of whatever is at the top of his mind. And even though his work comes off as very relatable for many of us existentially confused millennial Instagram scrollers, that’s not the real aim of Deckmann’s work. “Whether it’s relatable to others is out of my hands,” Deckmann says. 

The comments on Deckmann’s Instagram, though, have a lot of people chanting “same,” and “my life in a nutshell.”

Deckmann insists that most of his works are not autobiographical. “I get inspired by anything from human behaviour in general to situations in connection with my practice to the horrible condition of our world,” Deckmann says. “Not to mention pure fantasy.” 

One of Deckmann’s own favourite pieces on his Instagram is a book cover featuring a child on a swing, with the title: How to feel the way you felt before you knew what you know know. 

“It describes the loss of innocence, which I think everybody experiences whether they perceive it or not,” Deckmann explains. 

Reading these universally relatable book titles, it’s hard not to start wondering what such a book would actually say on the inside. But Deckmann says he can’t even begin to imagine that. It’s not a part of his work.

“I leave that to the viewer to imagine,” Deckmann says. “That’s your story, your work of art, and that’s way more interesting than anything I could ever come up with.”

If these books were to come out, we’re pretty sure they’d be instant bestsellers.